


Do We Grow or Do We Fade Away?

by SylphOfPaperPlanes



Category: American Animals (2018)
Genre: Dumb Boys Deal With Dumb Emotions, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Missing Scenes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 15:02:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15910662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylphOfPaperPlanes/pseuds/SylphOfPaperPlanes
Summary: Spencer divides the entirety of his life into Before and After. He feels like he has a right to it with everything he’s gone through, to get to put things in boxes, be his own organizer and make things simple for once in his goddamn life—Okay, that's a lie. There’s a category other than Before and After, a grey area on the timeline where everything is smudged and blurry. It’s pretty big one, actually, that starts that night in the car, crescendos, and tapers out somewhere along the line. At some point, he knows he needs to sit down and draw all this out properly, make a flowchart with every moment he fucked up in sequential order. That shit’ll be color-coated. Highly decorated.For now though, he just calls that time In Media Res. He likes the way it sounds, like it was important, in the middle of something that meant something.





	Do We Grow or Do We Fade Away?

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this behemoth of a fic since I saw this movie the first week it came out in June, and I'm so excited to get to share it with everyone. This was originally going to just be a short 3k scene but then it kind of..... gained a life of it's own, which is why it's now September and I've only just finished writing.
> 
> Please dear god someone talk to me about this movie I'm way too invested in this

Spencer divides the entirety of his life into Before and After. He feels like he has a right to it, with everything he’s gone through, to get to put things in boxes, be his own organizer, make things simple for once in his _goddamn life—_

 

* * *

 

There’s a moment, coming back from the gas station, back from the party, whatever. It’s when Spencer has already opened Pandora’s box and gotten the gears turning in Warren’s mind but still doesn’t understand that there’s no turning back. He remembers curling up in the passenger seat with his sneakers on the dash, angry at the heat for working intermittently and angry his hands for freezing up in the cold.

“We could start smaller than the Audubons,” he offers. He’s tapping an ink pen against his thumb, leaving a mess of black dots in stattico.

“Smaller?” Warren says without looking off of the road, and Spencer tries not to hear the laughter in his voice.

“Yeah, take shit from the main stacks that no one will miss.” He lets himself smile a bit, ignores Warren’s expression under the passing streetlights. “There’s atlases that must be worth hundreds. Smuggle ‘em out one by one, sell them online. Perfect crime.”

“Perfect crime?” A beat. “The perfect crime doesn’t get you pocket change, Spence.” He can’t ignore Warren’s laughter this time, harsh in the still air that reeks of smoke. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, then stops. The heater clicks back to life on the dash, hums loud in the moment of silence. “The perfect crime is orchestrated, slick, confident, fucking unforgettable. Hiding some books under your jacket and running out of the library like a kid in a convenience store? I thought you knew better.”

Spencer caps the pen, shoves it in his jacket pocket. He feels his face heat up as they stop under a red light. It throws strange shadows across his hands that he tries not ball into fists. Of fucking course, Warren the planner, Warren the mastermind, Warren who knows better.

The light changes, and the car shifts into the darkness. Spencer knows he’s still a little more than buzzed from the party—or whatever he bought from the gas station with his fake ID, fuck it, he can’t remember—and his reasoning’s out the window, but there’s a part of him that hates Warren, is sick of following him around though his dumb, convoluted plans. He’s done it for years, tricked everyone in their dumb little hometown to follow him through this or that, buy him beer, sell fake IDs with him, you name it. He’s sick of it. Sick and tired and fuming with it.

“Stop here,” he hears himself saying, already reaching to unlock the door. He recognizes where they are, and he knows it’s only a short walk to his dorm building. He’s done it enough, stumbled back at three in the morning high off his ass, piss-drunk, you name it. His roommate would deal with it like he always does, with his headphones pushed to max volume, hunched over his computer screen.

“Spence, wait, wait wait—” Warren says as he slams the door behind him and his rambling voice is muffled for a long second, but Spencer pauses while Warren rolls down the window. He doesn’t know why he stops, doesn’t walk away and let the mastermind himself play his fucking mind games with someone else, but there’s something in Warren’s eyes that he hasn’t seen before. A kind of seriousness that lacks his usual steeliness, a softness he’d call remorse if he thought Warren even knew what that was.

“Spence, I mean,” he continues, taking a deep breath. “Just, You deserve a perfect crime. Fuck it, you deserve better than that.” He makes a hand gesture like it explained the rest, but the unimpressed, confused look Spencer gives him apparently isn’t what he was hoping for.

Whatever was hiding behind his eyes shutters over, and he shakes his head, bites his lip.

In the long, tense moment, he hears the heat stutter off again.

“See you around, Reinhard,” Warren mumbles before driving off, and Spencer watches him go until the car is a speck in the distance, two tail lights through the fog.

He turns in the direction of his dorm, rubbing at the smudged ink on his hands, stamping the cold out of his feet.

(He doesn’t want to say he feels nothing, but if he’s feeling something, he really doesn’t know how to put it into words.)

 

* * *

 

 

Okay, he lied. There’s a category other than Before and After, a grey area on the timeline where everything is smudged and blurry. It’s pretty big one, actually, that starts that night in the car, crescendos, and tapers out somewhere along the line. At some point, he knows he needs to sit down and draw all this out properly, make a flowchart with every moment he fucked up in sequential order. That shit’ll be color-coated. Highly decorated.

For now though, he just calls that time In Media Res. He likes the way it sounds, like it was important, in the middle of something that meant something.

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t really know how to describe when he stopped being mad at Warren, just that there was just an evening a week later when his phone buzzes and Warren’s on the other end.

“Get down here, motherfucker,” He hears through the tinny line, from where he’s sprawled out on his bed in front of a canvas, hands covered in charcoal. “I miss my best friend, and I wanna see this library of wonders I’ve been hearing so much about.”

There’s a soft, warm feeling Spencer’s chest that he blames parly on the lit blunt in his hand—hey, he’d just figured out how to disconnect the smoke alarm in his room the week before, he’s allowed to celebrate—and partly on hearing the smile in Warren’s voice, and he doesn’t even think as he’s rolling out of bed, throwing on a sweatshirt, and letting the door slam shut behind him.

In half an hour, they’re on the roof of the athletic center across the way from the library, and Warren’s doing some mock-stakeout routine, mumbling into a tape recorder any time anyone enters or leaves the building. Spencer’s focused on the way the setting sun catches his hair, making the blonde highlights stand out in pinks and golds. He tries to sketch it the best he can, but all he’s got on him is the ink pen he threw in his pocket a week ago and a red pen he’d swiped from the studio his figure drawing class is in.

Drawing in ballpoint is tricky. There’s nothing maliable about the thin line it creates, and Spencer is stuck crosshatching to get the shadow under Warren’s cheekbone right when a single deft line in chalk pastels or charcoals could have sufficed. He’s seeing him in profile, the barest smile visible at the corners of his lips. The sun is setting faster than he’d like, and it’s giving his the picture a surreal quality, like the light is coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, like Warren’s hair is holding every drop of sunlight between the shadows.

“—balding administrator two exits the building, his dick in his hand. Man, he’s just really going at it, look at him go. You’d think there are laws about public decency here, but no, ladies and gentlemen, he’s just whacking off like no one’s business.”

Spencer only catches the back half of the sentence, but his head snaps up from the paper, eyes wide as he peers over the edge of the building—there’s a balding administrator for sure, but notably not jacking off in the middle of campus, just walking with a briefcase in hand to his car.

He stares confusedly at Warren, who is just sitting there cackling, his binoculars around his neck.

“I made you look, man! Should have seen your expression, holy shit, fell for it hook, line, and sinker!” He’s laughing too hard, tears starting to stream from the corners of his eyes, and Spencer thanks his lucky stars that they’re far enough from the edge that no one can see them. “It’s what you get for burying your nose in your sketchbook while I’m doing all the reconnaissance.”

Spencer wordlessly flips back a page and holds up his book with a smirk, showing off his thumbnail sketches of everyone who’d entered or left the library before he’d gotten distracted. He’d written the time down beneath each face with a bullet point list, real spy shit and everything. “Reconnaissance this, motherfucker,” he says proudly. Warren’s expression of shock and delight is worth any embarrassment of showing his art, tenfold.

“Holy shit,” Warren finally says, reaching for the sketchbook before Spencer can pull it back onto his lap. He pulls it out of his grasp and runs his fingertips over the tiny faces, apparently in awe and marveling over it. “You’re good, man. Insane.”

Spencer goes to reach for it again, but Warren’s turning the page and stops in his tracks, staring at the portrait of himself. He can’t even pass it off as someone else, with the obvious mop of hair on his head, the tape recorder held up to his lips and the ember at the tip of a blunt held loosely in his other hand, outlined by the setting sun. Warren seems hesitant to even touch it, letting his fingertips hover over the page.

He glances over, sees Spencer squirming.

“Is this me?” he asks, and Spencer knows he’s giving him an out, though even he doesn’t know why he’s embarrassed. He feels like he’s been caught red handed, like the police opened his notebook and the Audubon paintings fell out from between the pages.

“...Yeah,” he says finally, softly. He trains his eye over Warren’s shoulder, at the door to the library, like it would open up and swallow him whole.

“It’s amazing,” Warren says, and Spencer can feel his eyes on him. When he looks up to meet his gaze, it’s a thousand-megawatt smile, brighter than the sun, boring a hole straight through him.

In the wake of the sunset, of that smile, in the icy air of the rooftop with charcoal smudged under his nails, Spencer feels invincible.

 

* * *

 

Escapism? He doesn’t know if he considered the heist as a form of escapism. That’s armchair psychologist shit, and wholeheartedly reductive of the parts of his life that didn’t completely suck. At least he thinks so.

 

* * *

 

Not everything he does is with Warren, he thinks that’s important to mention.

He still has schoolwork to finish, sketches to do, classes to pass. He goes to the gym two days a week, visits his family every other weekend, tries to spend at least an hour a day in the studio, but more often than not ends up sitting on the floor of his room with paints spread out around him.

He doesn’t like to admit it, but he kind of hates the studio. He’s the only guy in the art program, and sometimes he feels like he’s missing everything that goes on between everyone else while they bond and click and share stories like they’re paint swatches. He’s a fixed point in the center of the room, doing thumbnail sketches in his own bubble with his headphones on while the girls move around him, all kinetic energy and conversation. He can’t do it, can’t stand it, can’t step back from his work the same way everyone else seems to have to do every five minutes. When he steps back, he starts to think—and when he thinks, he overthinks, second guesses, hates himself and his work.

Warhol always said something like _don’t think about making art, just get it done._ It was one of the quotes he cut out of an old Artforum magazine and pinned above his bed at home, and he’d taken the clipping with him to college. It’s easier to prop his easel up at the foot of his bed and surround himself with the nothing of working than to face the chaotic energy of the studio. There’s accounts of the early Romantic painters walking out of society and into the woods and the great unknown, not coming back until they’ve found themselves with a pile of sketches to prove it. Some of them call it their innermost moments, facing trials in and out of their own minds, feeling so desolately small and then whole again in a way that they weren’t before.

Spencer wants something like that, tangible and haunting, to rise up around him and cut him off from the world. There aren’t woods near campus, but if he closes his eyes at just the right time of night, he can imagine the trees around him. When he breathes in, it isn’t stale and metallic from the radiator. Just crisp and whole, filling his lungs even if it isn’t real.

When he hears the distant calls of an owl screeching and echoing around him, he doesn’t know if he’s imagining it.

***

They’re assigned a project. It’s a publicity thing for the school, from what he understands, something to promote the art program and get a bit of free advertising on the side. _Show us what you’re passionate about at Transylvania U_ , reads the heading of the paper, and he thinks its a joke until the professor announces that it’ll be half their grade for the semester.

It takes all of his willpower not to smash his head into the table in front of him.

He has a week before he has to propose a topic, and everyone else in the class is already buzzing about it. He knows someone is already planning an installation in the dining hall and someone else is already taking down sketches of any dorm room they can find their way into, but he has nothing.

All he can think of are the Audobons.

There’s an afternoon where he thinks, _fuck it_ , and makes an appointment to visit Special Collections. He declares his intentions on the project over email, makes up some bullshit story of hiking a lot as a kid and always finding the birds fascinating. The school, he learns, is a little more than proud of its collection and seems far too eager to let him study the books for whatever project he ends up doing.

(More importantly, Warren’s over the moon about it all.

“Holy shit, man, that’s fucking fantastic,” he says from where he’s splayed on the couch. “You’ll get to see it all up close and personal,” They’re watching _Reservoir Dogs_ again, not able to find anything at Blockbuster for the third week in a row. Spencer’s not paying attention to it anymore, just trying to focus on his problem sets for Calculus over the intermittent dialogue.

He tries not to feel too smug under the weight of the compliment.)

Getting there, though, starts...awkwardly.

He signs in, can’t bring himself to manage smalltalk with the librarian, just sits in awe of the paintings again from where he’s perched in his chair, afraid to ask her to flip the pages. He wants so badly to run his fingers over them, feel every last detail the way Warren does with his drawings. There are two bright gold warblers on the page in front of him, and, in the soft light of the room, they seem to _glow_. They’re magnetic and haunting, tangible and rich. He stares at the birds, they stare at him, balanced on the edge of feral wilderness and knowing recognition. He’s got his sketchbook balanced on his knee and he’s sitting in a chair in front of the glass case, but a strange, tight feeling is filling his chest like there’s too much air in the room and not enough all at once.

He’s being irrational. Overtired. Whatever. He can’t help but think that his backpack is weighed down with rough floor plans of the stacks that he wants to ink later. He can hear the radiator rumbling, the buzzing of the light bulbs. There’s a red light blinking in the corner of his vision that he thinks is a camera, but he can’t bring himself to tear his eyes away from the book and look guilty before they’ve even planned the goddamn heist. He fucked up, he fucked up so badly by showing his face here and everything is already doomed to fail—

“The birds can be quite intimidating,” the librarian says from where she materializes behind Spencer, making him jump about a foot in the air. He scrambles to hold on to the pencil that slips out of his fingers, and after a sequence worthy of a slapstick routine, he sheepishly tucks it behind his ear.

“Absolutely, ma’am,” he says in his best, most polite voice, the one he uses when he’s got the 11 PM cashier shift at the grocery store and the customer in front of him looks like they’re about to blow a fuse. It’s all surface-level empathy and a vague vulnerability, like he’s been caught in the middle of whatever the other person is dealing with, too. He’s practiced it too much at work, and it comes out instinctively, like some kind of camouflage he didn’t know he had.

Spencer turns around to face the librarian, and her gaze isn’t razor sharp, she’s not raring to tear him to pieces like a vulture. Instead, she’s smiling sympathetically like he’s really scared of the illustrations, and decidedly not furious at him for trying to scope out the Audubons like a criminal.

The only thing he can think is, _she bought it_.

She smiles, nods. “Let me know if you need a page turned,” she says as she sits back down at her desk.

Spencer looks down at the sketchbook in front of him and, through the blank sheet before him, he can see the faint outline of his drawing of Warren in red ink. He looks up again at the warblers in front of him, perched on their branch, eyes like dusty embers.

And he draws.

 

* * *

 

There’s stuff that stands out in hindsight, things he never would have realized in the moment with all the fervor of planning that surrounded him. It was never a question of why he wanted it, just how they were going to get it until it was too late.

Maybe he just wanted it too much.

 

* * *

 

He starts having dreams.

They’re vivid enough to be real, with him standing in the library like he’s in _Ocean's Eleven_ —the first one, the one from 1960, the one where they’re in suits with slicked back hair and comfortable in it like it’s a second skin.

It doesn’t matter how they got in, where the librarian went or where they got the keys, ‘cause Sinatra’s playing in the background and Warren’s unlocking the case with graceful movements, all sharp lines and confident smirks as the lock pops.

Sometimes, there’s a shootout, all dramatic and adrenaline-pumping, all them-against-the-world as they duck behind cases and tables like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. (Or at least, that’s how he thinks it went. He slept through the second half of that movie and woke up to Warren nudging his shoulder asking “wasn’t that cool?” and he just nodded along while he watched the credits rolling.)

It doesn’t matter; they’re always unscathed and thrumming as they stand while the pages of the Audubons are fluttering in the air around them.

And this is the part Spencer doesn’t understand. Because fuck, they’ve lost it, they’ve lost the one thing they’ve come here to get, but while they’re surrounded by the birds—moving so swiftly around the two of them that they look like they’ve taken flight with their wings coming off of the paper—Warren’s smiling something fierce with this childlike glee just under the surface. He bites his lip the way he always does, the way he does when he finally understands a reading for class, the way he does when Spencer thinks he isn’t looking—

He always wakes up then, trying to swallow around an indecipherable feeling in his throat and a pit in his stomach.

 

* * *

 

He finds it important to remind himself that not everything was about the heist.

Okay, fuck it, everything was about the heist.

 

* * *

 

It’s about twenty minutes after they’ve sent the first email to the fence—or the guy they thought was going to be the fence and ended up just costing them a couple weeks’ time and uncertainty until they could scrape together the money for the ticket to Amsterdam. Spencer’s walking half a step behind Warren, on their way back to his dorm from the computer lab, and he’s only half-focused on their conversation. It’s cold enough that they can see their breath, and he lets his eyes trace the shapes that rise up into the cloudy sky as Warren’s talking manically. He’s in the middle of a discussion with himself of transporting fine art, how they’re going to get the massive books around on the New York subway when the time comes and the logistics of smuggling the money out of the city, whenever that happens.

“BJ offered me a job,” Spencer says suddenly, and Warren stops mid-rant, tilts his head in confusion.

“Who the fuck is—”

“Betty Jean? The librarian at Spec Coll. ‘S what everyone else calls her in the office.” Spencer catches himself reaching for a pencil he doesn’t have behind his ear, and absentmindedly rubs the back of his neck. “Said I showed some promise with art history. Could do work in museums when I got older, or whatever.”

That’s not exactly how it went down, but he got the gist of it. It’d been one of his weekly visits to work that dumb project when she commented on how he shows up more than some of the student workers, how they’re looking for people with some intent to pursue related fields instead of the boatloads of English majors that seem to apply every fall looking to peek at a first folio or two before they graduate.

For a split second after she asked him, Spencer could see the future laid out before him, days spent at some big name museum, a hotshot conservator by day, getting to brush shoulders with the rich and famous while using his talents to stand among the greats before getting to go home at night to his art and—

Warren’s glare snaps him out of his reverie. He can’t place what emotion is behind it. Part of him wants it to be some kind of elation, like he’s gotten an in at the department, but more than likely it’s the lead up to some offhanded insult. _How could you be so dumb to get on a first name basis with her, what were you thinking, going soft like that_ —

“Is that what you’d want to do?” The question surprises Spencer more than anything, but it sounds genuine from where Warren’s hunching over himself, hands in his pockets because he’d forgotten his gloves in his room again.

“It’d be nice not having to work night shifts at the grocery store,” he hears himself say. It feels like an admission of guilt, and he realizes why when he sees Warren’s expression sink. It’s subtle, just the slight downturn at the corners of his lips, the light that fades behind his eyes. He realizes what it’d mean to take the job, to “ _show promise_ ” to the institution they’d spent a month planning to rob blind.  

That’d be it. Over. Mundane day jobs for the both of them until they grow old and shrivel away.

“I uh...” He starts up again, and catches himself mirroring Warren’s posture, hands in his pockets, head at a slight angle, peering up at the other. “I don’t think I’ll go for it.” He starts walking, jerks his chin in the general direction of the library as Warren catches up to him. ”Won’t need a job soon anyway, yeah?”

He tries to hide his smile when he feels a cold arm around his shoulder, wrapped in a wordless hug as they move through the quiet campus under the setting sun.

They’ll go back to his dorm, get wasted, and he’ll ink the floorplans he’s got stuffed in his sketchbook. They’ll shout along to whatever’s on the radio, feel immortal until they fall asleep in the early hours of the morning.

 

* * *

 

No, that's a lie, almost everything he just said was a lie. It was always about the heist, but the heist was about more than just the books.

 

* * *

 

This is how it goes:

They do end up in Spencer’s dorm ‘cause his roommate’s gone on one of his week-long mystery disappearances. They drink whatever Warren’s stolen from the last party they went to, something that tastes strong and burns his throat as they drink straight from the bottle.

The heat’s officially stuck on in the building, and Spencer spares a glare at the radiator clunking away on the other side of the room before throwing open the window to the cold night air. They’ve shed their shirts and feebly attempted to position themselves in the way of the breeze, but he still feels the heat itching at his skin, hanging heavy in the room.

He sits on the cooler tile floor with his back to the bedframe and spreads the plans out around him, passing the bottle back and forth from where Warren’s sitting on the mattress above him. They can’t get any good stations on the radio; a strong, freezing rain is starting to fall, and the wind’s bad enough to mess with the signal. They settle for whatever old crooner music hour is being played on the public access station, and it’d be an vaguely domestic moment if it wasn’t for the heist they mumble on and off about over the static from the speaker.

He tries to ink the floor plans, he really does, but the tip of the pen is too thin and drawing a straight line is so far out of his grasp while he’s buzzed and Warren is busy running his fingers through his hair where his arm is hanging off the bed. He leans into the touch absentmindedly, stuck on a strange feeling in the center of his chest that’s warm and off-center.

Eventually, he just pushes all of it away, sweeps the yellow lined paper into piles and shoves it back in his backpack. The hand on his scalp stills, and he doesn’t really think when takes a board off of his easel and throws the sheet that covered it onto the floor.  It’s one of the pieces for that project, larger than the rough sketches he’d been doing in his sketchbook. The colored pencils he picks up from his night table are more forgiving to the slight waiver in his hand, and all he’s got to do is get a rough color base down before he has to work on the fine details another day.

“What’s that?” Warren asks from somewhere above him. He’s starting to slur his syllables, further gone than Spencer is. The bedsprings creak as he shifts his weight, hanging half off the bed with his hand shifting from Spencer’s hair to the back of his neck. Warren’s always been a touchy drunk, needing a point of contact to center him or he’ll float away, wander and get aimlessly lost. Spencer’s been that point more times than he can count, so he doesn’t think much of Warren’s chin resting on his shoulder as he watches him work.

“Spence, Spence,” Warren says insistently, shaking him lightly. Spencer can feel the rumble of his voice through his shoulder like distant thunder. “C’mon, you always get so moody and serious when you’re drawing. What’re you working on. You gotta tell me. It’s partner-in-crime rules.”

“It’s for that bullshit art project. The Audubon one,” he says, not taking his eyes off of the swift, deliberate movements of the pencil. The outline’s faint to the point that he wonders if Warren even knows what it is, and all he’s got worked in right now is the slope of a neck and the shadows under a jaw.

“Doesn’t really look like the birds, Reinhard.” He feels Warren tracing a line down the side of his throat, following the path of the pencil that Spencer is gripping tightly.

“Not supposed to be, yet, dumbass.” He stills the pencil, holds out his other hand. Warren passes the bottle off wordlessly, and Spencer’s careful not to spill anything on the drawing as he takes a long drink. He remembers distant, pretentious advice his dad had given him once, about how you’re supposed to drink whiskey from the front of the mouth to the back, or whatever, but he’s not drinking to enjoy the taste, just to feel the burn at the back of his throat and the fuzz in his head. He focuses on the warmth of Warren’s fingertips against his throat as he swallows and it doesn’t disappear when he hands the bottle back.

The room’s nearly on the verge of spinning, and he feels the warmth spreading from his chest. Everything’s just a bit brighter and smoother at the edges, and he knows that he’d wobble the second he’d try to stand. The points of contact are steadily fading into pools of warmth along his pulse point as he blinks a few times, tries to get his bearings back on the conversation.

Right. Birds. “Half the face is gonna be based on the Audubons. This one,” he points to the faint outline, and Warren leans forward to try and get a better look. “This one’s gonna be one of the owls. Really liked the eyes, all big and...” He makes a wide gesture, trying to find the right word, but Warren’s nodding like he’s got it. “It’s all in the eyes, Warren. How many fucking times have I gone to look at ‘em and they’re just...looking at me like they know something I don’t.”

Warren’s hanging half off the bed with that focused look again. His hair’s tickling Spencer’s nose as he follows the lines of the drawing with his intense gaze and the fingertips on his neck have turned into a palm pressed steadily on his shoulder for support. Spencer’s gotten used to Warren’s praise for his art, his comments on detail and color and everything else. What he’s not used to though, is the wordless, breathless gasp as he recognizes the faint lines that barely stand out from the white background. Spencer’s antsy as he watches Warren’s eyes light up with small flares of recognition, feels it in the way Warren squeezes his shoulder. Spencer waits for something, any comment on the paper in front of him at all, about how close he must have been sitting to the Audubons, how their hard work is going to pay off soon, but the long, awed silence sits between them.

Spencer wants to laugh at how ridiculous they must look, well on their way past drunk, curled around the drawing board on his lap. He’s suddenly reminded of the pair of warblers in the Audubons, with the inquisitive tilts of their heads, peering out of the page and down at him from their branch.

Warren slowly moves back from the drawing, pulling himself back mostly onto the bed; Spencer only lets himself feel disappointment at the lack of contact for a split second as Warren takes a long drink and closes his eyes against the burn, before passing the bottle off. Spencer watches him settle back, propping his chin on his palm like lifting his head is far too much effort—and hell, maybe it is. From this angle, Warren’s all regal, staring down at Spencer with his lips parted, hair falling around his face. He’s got that intense look in his eyes again, and Spencer wants to draw it, wants to draw it all so badly that that spot in his chest _aches_ but he can’t move.

That’s the moment he realizes it, all of it. He doesn’t fully understand what _it_ is, just that there’s some resounding reveal going on beneath the whiskey fuzz in his brain. There’s been years of something like this buzzing under the surface, but Spencer finds himself at the intersection of _oh shit_ and _oh fuck_ as he really starts to see the woods for the trees, starts to see why he’s been itching for Warren’s praise, why he’d been following him around, fixating on the way light shines through his hair and his smile and the way he bites at the skin around his nails when he thinks no one is looking—

There’s a summer storm forming in his throat; he tastes comprehension like it’s the precursor to lightning, grounding to the spot at the back of his neck that’s still humming with the absence of Warren’s hand.

His first thought is that he didn’t think he was gay.

His second thought is that he needs a hell of a lot more to drink.

His third thought is that he doesn’t want to think anymore, and he chases the lightning in his throat with alcohol, drains the last of the bottle and coughs at the burn.

“Hey, hey—you okay, man?” Warren asks, snapped out of whatever daze he’s in, reaching down to hit Spencer’s back weakly. He’s repeating Spencer’s name over and over again, half nurturing, half drunken babbling. His movement’s kind of clumsy and delayed and Spencer wants to wave him off, tell him he’s perfectly fine, but apparently major gay revelations impair lung function like a motherfucker. He’s giving feeble, half coughs like an idiot, but it’s a long minute before it slows. When he starts to get his breath back, Warren’s rubbing small circles between his shoulder blades and mumbling something stupid about how Spencer _can’t die before the heist, how fucking lame would Ocean’s Eleven be if Danny kicked the fucking bucket before he even got to Vegas, dude_.

He’ll admit, getting to sit there for a long moment just focusing on Warren’s touch and how the slight breeze cut thought the heat of the room is sort of helpful; he lets himself fall into the lull of it, the domestic nicety that he doesn’t need to think about. No paradigm shift, nothing.

“This is nice,” he says, voice raspy, and Warren’s hand stills, disappears.

“That’s kind of gay, dude,” Warren says, and fuck it if it isn’t the funniest thing Spencer’s heard in his _life_ , now isn’t it. Funnier than that time when Warren spit milk out of his nose in eighth grade, funnier than them thinking they could ever pull off stealing anything, much less the Audubons—

He’s curling around himself again, shaking with laughter. The drawing board’s discarded as he’s caught up in the heady buzz and the dumb giggling he can’t bottle up. He doesn’t know when or why Warren joins in but he does, and his laugh is like church bells with how high and brassy it sounds, all angelic until he snorts and it sends them into another round of it.

 _No shit it’s gay,_ he wants to say once he’s starting to catch his breath again, but the second he starts to turn around, Warren’s got his arms around Spencer’s chest and he’s being hauled up onto the bed. He lets himself go limp in the grasp, feels the rasp of the sheets against his bare shoulders. He’s internally cursing how strong Warren is, having kept up with athletics and all that shit while Spencer wasted away in a studio for half the semester. Instead of saying anything though, he’s lying on his back on his sheets, staring up at the ceiling, trying to get bearings while the room stops spinning. He feels one of Warren’s arms caught beneath him but doesn’t—can’t—bring himself to move.  

“Not letting you die on my watch, motherfucker,” Warren says proudly, peering down at him from where he’s half-sat up. His expression’s all scrunched, faux-serious and concerned before he breaks it with an easy smile.

Looking back, Spencer’ll know what he ends up doing is irrational, knows that it was basically jeopardizing everything they’d been working toward, but in that one moment Spencer sees Warren smiling like the sun and feels his palm spread wide between his shoulder blades. For the first time in ages, he feels compelled to _do something_ , to stop waiting for everything to happen around him.

There’s the split second when he surges upward, feels the hand fall away from his spine as he presses his lips to Warren’s. He’s clumsy-drunk and his fingers are stiff where they’re cupping his jaw, but all he can focus on is how Warren’s lips are warm and dry against his, how he catches him halfway to speaking, how he turns his head imperceptibly, hovers his hands just barely over Spencer’s shoulders—

It’s basically just a sloppy peck, barely longer than a second or two, but somewhere along the way Spencer’s shut his eyes. When he opens them, after he’s pulled back a half inch, Warren’s staring at him with that weird, intense look he’s had on and off since that night in the car. This close—so close that Spencer could count his eyelashes and feel his breath in the air between them—he can see the way his irises move as he’s taking in the entirety of Spencer’s face, like he’d never seen it before. Spencer feels his fingertips hovering over his cheek, so close that he can feel the imperceptible tremors.

It takes a second of staring through the fog to realize that there’s fear in Warren eyes.

Spencer watches Warren shake his head, a slight, abrupt movement he wishes he was imagining, and the lightning in his throat sinks, sinks sinks until its a spider web of dread in his stomach.

Warren’s breath is coming faster now, fluttering and panicked like a startled animal, like a canary you’ve got caught between your palms. He doesn’t break eye contact with Spencer, looking for all the world like he’s trying to speak but he’s got the words caught in the back of his throat.

Whatever he wants to say, Spencer doesn’t give him the chance. Sitting up in bed, having to watch Warren’s sinking, unsure expression hurts more than anything else in the world.

“Fuck,” he says, eloquent as always. “I fucked up.” His tongue is heavy in his mouth, and he's saying the words before he finishes thinking them. All he knows is that he’s on damage control, needing to take it all back before it all crumbles around him.

He’s stumbling out of the bed, trying to keep his feet under him as he backs away slowly. His heart’s hammering out of his chest and he’s choking on panic. “Didn’t mean it, it was fucking stupid.” He watches something shift in Warren’s eyes, sees his posture stiffen, and that’s the last Spencer can take, seeing him sitting there half-shocked and hurt, before he darts from the room, slamming the door behind him.

He locks himself in the bathroom at the end of the hall, stares at his his reflection in the smudged mirror, tries resolutely to keep the tears from spilling. He comes close when he presses his fingers to his lips, feeling the buzz that still lingers from the kiss, trying to hold onto it as it slowly fades. Distantly, he hears glass shattering, but fuck if he cares anymore.

When he brings himself to come out an hour later, the door’s cracked open and his room’s empty. There’s broken glass against the far wall, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that Warren chucked the whiskey bottle after he left.

He tries not to feel disappointed, just climbs under the sheets that still smell like Warren and lets sleep drag him under.

 

* * *

 

He... he hates this part of the story.

That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but god fucking damn it, he’s allowed to hate every moment of it.

 

* * *

 

Spencer wakes up and feels like the human embodiment of a bruise, can’t open his eyes against the sunlight pouring into the room until the thrumming ache in his skull dies down. He hasn’t been this hungover in his life, worse than the dumb fucking Delta Sigma Phi pledge night that made him sick at the smell of beer for weeks.

(No—no, wait,  there’d been one other time that he’d felt this hungover, he thinks. He’d stayed over at Warren’s the night after his high school graduation, sitting on the roof with all the shitty wine they could have swiped from downstairs without getting crucified by Mrs. Lipka. They talked for hours about the future with slurred words and grand gestures, acting like they knew where they were going until the sun rose and they stumbled back through the dormer window onto the floor of Warren’s bedroom. Spencer remembers waking up with an elbow to the ribs and Warren’s snoring droning in his ears, all peaceful and comforting around the mind-splitting headache and nausea that came in waves.

He doesn’t like the way his stomach lurches at the thought of Warren, so he presses his face back into his pillow, trying not to think at all.)

It only washes over him when he’s in the bathroom a full hour and a half later as he’s halfheartedly trying to wash the taste of death out of his mouth with listerine. Something clicks about the night before as he looks into the mirror and remembers standing there while the sound of breaking glass rang through the hall.

It hits him like a slap in the face when it all comes rushing back in tidal waves, Warren’s fingers against his throat, his shoulders, wrapped around his chest as he’s lifted onto the bed and—

And the kiss.

Spencer hears more than feels his forehead hit the glass of the mirror. Fuck.

“Fuck,” he says out loud to the empty room, trying not to focus on the way his voice cracks or how the pounding headache behind his eyes is starting to burn like tears. He had to go and ruin everything, had to scare off his best friend with his dumb, drunken decisions. He thinks vaguely of the floorplans sitting in his backpack, of all the work they’ve put in that he’s dissolved because he couldn’t listen to reason for ten fucking seconds. Now, Warren’s never going to want to talk to him again, never going to look in his direction except to call him a...

He doesn’t really know. He doesn’t know if he wants to know.

It takes a long minute to realize the gaping space he feels growing in his chest, like a black hole somewhere to the right of his heart, and another to recognize it as the dull buzz of loneliness.

And here’s the thing—it doesn’t fade. He doesn’t want to sound callous, but usually if he’s feeling hell-and-back awful, earth-shatteringly shitty to a monumental degree, he just needs to give it some time before he can bounce back, or at least look at the situation and move on.

Instead, the feeling sits in his chest, harsh and unmoving when he goes to class, goes to the gym, stares at his canvas with the volume on his walkman pushed to the max. For a week. He’s in a daze that doesn’t seem set on breaking, barely paying attention his family's questions when he goes home for dinner.

At first, he tries not to pay it any attention. He’s got exams to study for and the art project to finish and any number of other thing that he’d been putting off in the fervor of planning the heist. Now though, his world’s slowed down to the crawl that he associates with academia; he actually sits down to study, goes to the library and everything. Maybe he spends an awful lot more time hanging around his room than before, but it’s not like it matters. He only reaches for his phone twice before he remembers.

The worst of it though, is Friday evening. Friday was their sacred movie day, the one time to drop all other plans to rush out to Blockbuster or Hollywood Video for whatever heist film they could find under the guise of research. In the end, Spencer knows it was just an excuse to get together and smoke and drink and act like the idiot teenagers that they knew they were, but when it’s 9 PM and there’s still radio silence from Warren, Spencer lets himself feel a solid, crushing defeat when he realizes how deeply he messed everything up. This isn’t the type of thing he could wait to blow over like that night in the car, or like when Warren borrowed his Gameboy in third grade and lost it within the hour.

He doesn’t have it in him to try and go out and get a movie on his own—besides, they usually end up watching it at Warren’s anyway since he’s the one with the TV and a halfway-decent couch—nor does he have it in him to curl up in bed and admit defeat, especially while his roommate is back and sitting at his computer with obnoxious music bleeding out of his headphones.

Instead, he settles down at his desk with a set of flashcards for his Art History exam coming up on Monday. He’d be honest in saying that his mind has been on more important things than which of Raphael’s madonnas is which or where in the Vatican each his frescoes are, but he can’t think of anything better that needs doing.

Spencer leans back in his chair, kicks his feet up onto the desk, and starts going through the cards methodically. If he sighs halfheartedly, sue him.

“You need to get over it, dude.” Spencer doesn’t pay it a lot of attention at first, thinking his roommate is just talking to himself again. Raphael’s _Self Portrait with Friend, 1520._

“No really dude, you need to get the fuck over this.” This time, Spencer looks up, glares at his roommate, who's still got some dumb video game open on the screen in front of him, but is shooting him a sidelong glance with his headphones around his neck.

“I dunno what you’re talking about,” he mumbles before turning his focus back to the paintings in front of him again. _The Expulsion of Heliodorus, 1511._

“Yes you fucking do, man. All goddamn week you’ve been moping over some chick or something. Either screw her already or get over it.” He’s looking at his game again, so Spencer gets away with rolling his eyes.

“It’s uh, just a thing with my best friend? It’s nothing, man.” He catches himself rubbing at the back of his neck, looking down at the flashcards in a kind of embarrassed defeat. _Madonna of the Goldfinch, 1506_.

“Well then let me know when you man up and tell your friend that you’re in love with his girlfriend. Maybe then you’ll stop sulking around.”

He tries to spend less time in his room, after that.

***

Spencer wakes up at four in the morning in a cold sweat, struggling to land solidly in reality while his head’s still buzzing from a dream. He’s sitting up, struggling to swallow down a deep breath as it washes over him in flashes of images: a hand between his shoulder blades, lips on his, fingers cupping his jaw, Warren’s wide eyes staring at him from a hairbreadth away.

He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes, lets himself groan in frustration. This wasn’t the first time he’d woken up like this, with his skin thrumming with the memory of something that’s never happened, not even the first time this week. This time though, it’s unbearable, expanding the cavern in his chest, making him sick to his stomach with dread.

It’s in that moment that he feels how the walls are starting to close in on him, the way the darkness is suffocating, the way that his roommate’s snoring and the radiator’s rumbling were smothering him. It’s enough that he can’t take it anymore, any of it, and he forces himself to get up, take a cold shower, and throw on jeans and sweatshirt before he’s walking out onto the barren campus.

The wind is cold when it blows over his wet hair, and he curls into the hood of his sweatshirt. It’s late enough in the year that sunrise feels a long ways away, and against the inky sky, he can see the faintest few stars trying to push their way through the haze and streetlight, the smooth paths of planes with their pulsating lights. He focuses on the way he can feel the sidewalk through the soles of his shoes, the way the chill in the air fills his lungs in a way it couldn’t in the dorms.

The evening’s taken on a weird, transient quality like the fog of a dream. Spencer hears his own steps echo before they’re absorbed by the nothing. He doesn’t know where he’s walking, but at least it feels good to walk. All the lights in the buildings he passes are dark, and when he finds himself slowing and stopping, he almost doesn’t recognize the facade of the library at first glance.

He could point out the number and placements of the cameras with his eyes closed at this point, could tell you exactly when the last staff member walked out those doors and when the first one would walk right back in in a couple of hours. He couldn’t count the time he spent behind those doors staring at the one thing that’d change his future, the time spent plotting and sketching floor plans, the time shoulder to shoulder with Warren while they planned for a way out of this life in wings and paper and ink.

And none of it matters anymore.

There’s a sound behind him—or at least he thinks there is—something light and fluttering and scratching that sends his heartbeat racing in the silence. He doesn’t turn around, just starts walking quickly away from the building. The tenuous peace of the early morning is shattered, and Spencer’s back in the exhausted fight or flight that’s characterized the past week.

He’s fighting back burning tears for some reason, and he knows he can’t go back to the dorms like this. He can already feel that sleep is out of the equation tonight, an itch under his skin that’ll keep him up until the sun rises.

He’s just sick of it, all of it, the whiplash change every aspect of the cataclysmic shift that tore away his closest friendship, the aimlessness that settled in the absence of Warren, the loneliness that’s burning it’s way through his chest, everything.

It’s probably muscle memory that brings him to the art building, and he doesn’t hesitate before pushing through the unlocked door into the darkened hallways. It’s not uncommon for students to come and go late into the night, but Spencer’s blissfully alone when the lights flicker on in the studio. This late into the semester, everyone’s got their projects spread out. Every table is covered in papers and paints while sculptures are propped against the walls and tarps are spread out over the floors. Spencer has himself a small corner far from the door, with his thumbnail sketches tacked to the walls and his charcoal pencils stashed behind a canvas. He’s barely thinking as he sits down on the linoleum floor and reaches for them.

He’s started spending afternoons here when he doesn’t have class, trying to hone in on his drawings for the Transy U project. He’s got most of the finished ones sitting in his dorm room, not his best work, but more than enough to get him through the class with his GPA intact. He’s got the last of them half-finished here, but he know he doesn’t have it in him to try and put the finishing touches on it in the state he’s in.

Instead, he turns to one of the blank canvases he’d stretched months ago. Someone had fucked up in ordering the frames years ago, so they had closets full strangely sized wooden stretchers that they gave away by the armfuls. The canvas Spencer’s sitting across from is larger than most of the one’s he’s worked with, towering over him as he sits in front of it; it’s a pleasant change from the small drawing boards and scraps of paper that he’s been working with.

He doesn’t have the energy to actually search for his acrylic paints, so he starts working with the charcoals. It’s all autopilot motion as he roughs out the outline, not paying attention to what or why he’s putting it down on the canvas, just letting himself feel the motions as his arm extends in wide arcs, the tension in his fingers as he carves details in small strokes. It’s comforting; it’s cathartic. He doesn’t think as he works, just lets himself recreate what’s been burning behind his eyelids for days on end.

Even when he was younger, he’d need to deal with things like this. There was no linear talking it out, no journaling or any of that shit. Spencer needed to feel the gesture, be able to see what’s been hovering over him. He’s got sketchbooks back at home filled with faces of his family, of his friends, of sunsets and places he’s left behind because he can’t just keep it all in.  There’s a kind of ownership in it, like he’s able to hold it all in the palm of his hands, like everything that frightens him can be pressed onto a surface so he’s able to process it in his own meditative state.

And so, the rough, hazy outline of Warren is staring down at him. It’s all wide, dark strokes of charcoal forming the way he looked reclined on the bed the moments after the kiss, his brows furrowed, lips parted, hands tight in the sheets. The only thing Spencer can’t get right is his eyes—he’d spent an insane amount of time on those alone, trying to remember the exact mix of emotion, the way they tracked every last movement he made, all of it. He doesn’t think he’s ever going to get close, but his fingers are aching from where they’re curled tightly around the pencil and he can feel exhaustion pulling on the edges of his consciousness.

When he sits back on his heels, with the pre-dawn haze just barely visible through the windows, he feels like he can take a deep breath for the first time in weeks.

 

* * *

 

He wants to say this time made him a better person, that any of this made him a better person.

He thinks the hallmark of a better person is not having to think about things like this.

( In his opinion at least, he has a ways to go.)

 

* * *

 

Spencer doesn’t want to say that he makes a habit of those early morning studio sessions, but it’s the only time that he has the space to himself. It makes the days he has to spend surrounded by the chaos and bustle of the other students miles easier to deal with when he knows that there’s some time that he’ll have to himself. His own corner of the universe, his own personal forest to wander into.

He doesn’t want to call it settling, he’ll say that for sure. He still feels just barely off kilter, like he’s getting used to putting weight on a broken foot that’s just barely healed, but there’s some kind of peace that he’s found in focusing on his art. There’s no anxiety when he shakes BJ’s hand as he leaves his last session with the Audubons, no nervous flicker of his gaze as he looks for cameras in every building he walks into.

It’s an exhale. It’s a relief.

With a kind of rueful acceptance, he focuses back on his life as-is. He’s bored with it all, but there’s comfort in the routine. The whole thing with the heist was lofty as hell, a dream they thought they had in the palms of their hands but was brought down quickly and painfully. It’s probably better than getting caught, he thinks. Probably.

More than anything, he wants his friend back.

Now though, he focused on cutting mats for his work, the studio thankfully empty even though it’s somewhere around five in the evening. He’s never been able to think about anything else while he takes the measurements and plans out all of the cuts, and he can’t afford to fuck up any more of them; he’s down to his last sheet of matboard and he’s still got two more drawings to frame. It shouldn’t exactly be slow going, but he keeps catching himself forgetting to add inches or double check that his lines are straight. At least the radio on the table beside him is good for drowning out stray thoughts, even if it’s stuck on the shitty rock station from two towns over.

Distantly, he hears a door open and close from somewhere in the building, but he’s focused on drawing a swift line and following it with the bevel cutter. He likes the motion. It’s repetitive, meditative, like inking over old sketches and feeling the memory of it in every gesture.

Dully, he remembers that he’s still got the library floor plans somewhere in his dorm, inked at two in the morning on another one of the nights where he couldn’t sleep. He doesn’t know why he did it, even after the heist dissolved. Maybe he needed the familiarity. Maybe it was catharsis, getting to live the last of the hope of it out.

Fuck, he doesn’t know, maybe he doesn’t want it to be over.

He hears someone clear their throat from the doorway behind him, an uncomfortable half cough.

“Hey sorry, is the radio too loud?” He asks, making last minute marks so he doesn’t lose where he is. He’d been on the other side of this plenty of times, where he’d have to be the guy from his life drawing session to go tell someone to knock it off, and it’s with a sheepish shrug that he turns the volume down. “I could have sworn there wasn’t going to be a class in the gallery today—”

His voice cuts out as he turns around, locks eyes with Warren. Warren, who’s leaning on the door frame like he lived there. Spencer takes him in all at once—his half-smile, his bright eyes, his gloved hands holding a folded piece of computer paper. He’s reminded suddenly of the canvas at the back of the room, hidden under a tarp. Of shaking hands and and warm air and soft lips. Every last emotion from that night comes flooding back in the silence, and he catches himself holding him breath.

“Hey man,” Warren says, more hesitant than anything. “Your roommate said you’d be here.”

“Uh, yeah, I’m here.” Spencer responds dumbly, until he can finds his words again. “It’s good to see you again.” Smooth as hell. Totally functional. He makes a gesture that he doesn't entirely understand the meaning of, still gripping the pencil. “Are we, uh. Are we good?”

“Yeah, why wouldn’t we be?” A beat. “It doesn’t matter.” Warren says it casually, but Spencer’s known him too long. He sees the tension in his shoulders and the way he raises his chin ever-so-slightly. He doesn’t know if this is forgiveness, but they’re going to forget it anyway, apparently.

On some level Spencer’s disappointed under the relief. Did he want something to have come from that night, from reaching out blindly and getting burned for it? Maybe. It didn’t matter anymore.

Warren doesn’t wait for a response, just walks forward into the studio, looking around like there’d be someone else in the room with them before unfolding the half-crumpled paper. From what Spencer can see from the angle he’s at, it’s a printout of an email, from the fence if he’s reading it right.

“We’re back in business.”

Oh. So that’s what it was. This was no forgiveness, no rekindling of the friendship. It was business.

It was all about the heist. Of course.

“That’s great.” He hears himself say it, all authentic sounding. A little surprised. Not at all hurt.

He’d take it.

He’ll probably need to find those floor plans, he thinks.

 

* * *

 

Even then, he knew what he was feeling was over more than just the heist.

It didn’t matter is Warren didn’t feel the same; it was enough to have been forgiven with the what-if tucked into the back of his mind.

 

* * *

 

As good as he feels like they are at planning heists, Spencer knows that their trip-planning skills are abysmal. So he’s not surprised when they misjudge how long the trip would take, leave too late, forget to account for rush hour traffic, and find themselves driving through the night, daisy-chaining whatever radio stations they can catch along the I-70.

He’ll admit that he’s taken aback by how normal everything feels, with his sketchbook propped up on his knees and Warren behind the wheel. They’ve got the windows down to keep the car from reeking like pot for the next month and a half, and the cold air feels like its own kind of heaven. The wind in his hair is a special kind of freedom, and he laughed something fierce as he watched Lexington fade in the rearview mirror. They didn’t have the books with them, but fuck if it felt like it anyway.

From the start, while the sun was up the world is glowing, things feel as right as they can, and they’re joking and laughing like the last week hadn’t rocked everything on its axis. They’re back to planning what they’d do with the money, where they’d go, who’d they prove wrong. Warren’s got that sharp tension still; his laugh is just a little bit too forced and his grip on the wheel just a little too tight, but Spencer doesn’t blame him.

He falls asleep somewhere in West Virginia just after the sun sets, hard as he tries to stay awake. One minute he’s watching sparse headlights pass in the opposite direction, the next he’s pulled into a dark, dreamless sleep to the country coming through the radio.

He remembers the next couple of hours in flashes as he drifts in and out: the windows rolling up, cutting off the cold, the lining of his sweatshirt as it brushes against his cheek, Warren humming along to something on the radio, the blue glow of the clock on the dash, the rhythmic hum of tires on highway.

At some point, he opens his eyes to slits, no energy to make his eyelids move any more than they already have. Maybe it’s the exhaustion or maybe it’s the high or maybe it’s a trick of the light, but he swears he sees Warren looking at him, his expression all soft and open, readable like he never is. It’s only for a second, before Spencer shifts at a bump in the road, and then everything snaps back into place and Warren’s eyes are back on the road again, gaze steely and unreadable.

He lets himself sleep again, and drifts until Warren shakes him awake at the first crack of sunlight, asking him to drive the rest of the way.

 

* * *

 

At the time, Spencer didn’t know if what he was seeing was the truth, or just what he wanted to be seeing. But truth is inconsistent and hard to pin down, an impossible concept to try and salvage from a trainwreck in multiple points of view.

So yeah, fuck it, as far as he’s concerned, he calls this the truth.

 

* * *

 

Manhattan, Spencer realizes, is its own kind of euphoria.

Lexington is pretty much as small as a city can get, but New York’s a cramped and sprawling world all it’s own. He’s so used to getting to see the horizon no matter where he looks, practice from years of quick landscape studies with easy-to-spot vanishing points and singular buildings rising out into the sky. Here though, he can barely find what direction the sun’s coming from; the buildings crowd over them no matter where they are.

They get there at the crack of dawn—with the sunrise coloring the sky and water and everything some kind of hazy pink-blue while they crossed over the George Washington Bridge onto the island—and no one is there to stop them from doing dumb touristy shit. Warren’s big on the Statue of Liberty and all of the kitchy merch that they came across while waiting for the ferry, but Spencer loved standing in the middle of Time Square, watching the bright, bright lights and the people moving around him. There’s something about being in the center of everything and still being so small at once that bowls him over. Anyone can hide here; he’s in the leagues of tourist families and diamond smugglers at the same time; he’s a somebody because everyone’s a nobody.

He loves it.

By the time the sun’s starting to set, throwing strange orange shades between the glass of the buildings, Warren’s apparently had his fill of the sights, dragging Spencer into the nearest bar. It was a place he didn’t catch the name of, and based on the looks they get when they walk in, it’s apparently a local haunt, not too fond of people that stick out like sore thumbs with their curious gazes and giggling, conspiratorial whispers.

By the time they’re able to catch the bartender’s attention—a heavily tattooed man who had been steadfastly ignoring them in favor of regulars—Warren’s already spitting out a drink order for two like he’s rehearsed it in the mirror.

“I don’t think I’m gonna drink tonight,” Spencer says, leaning against the bar next to him. Some part of his stomach sinks at the thought of the last time he drank, the feeling of not being in control anymore, the decisions he didn't realize he made until it was too late.

The corners of Warren’s lips turn down and Spencer can see disappointment behind his eyes, but he still nods, slips his fake ID across the bar with the cash. “Your loss,” he replies with a shrug, taking the glasses for himself. Something about the lack of reaction makes Spencer uneasy, but maybe it’s because he’s used to the theatrics of Warren not getting his way. He’d seen him get huffy and passive-aggressive about things, especially when he felt that they interfered with his well-planned visions of perfection, Instead though, Spencer’s left in the unexpected lurch of Warren seeming to go with the flow, sitting back and enjoying his drinks.

The regulars seem to warm up to them—or at least Warren—after a few drinks, and it’s no time before he’s up and mingling while Spencer's in the corner drinking his diet coke. He watches him easily flit about, laughing and swaying to whatever music some local band is playing from the other side of the room while he’s polishing off drinks with a casual smile. He thinks it’d be wrong to say he was jealous; jealousy implies some level of resentment, and Spencer’s just stuck feeling some nebulous, uncomfortable longing that he can’t quite pin down.

That is, until Warren’s speaking to a girl with long blonde hair, all lanky angles that reminds him of the herons in the Audubons. Spencer watches Warren lean in, so close that she could probably feel his breath on her ear, could count his eyelashes if she just turned her head half an inch—

So maybe he can pin it down. Doesn’t mean he’s going to.

He doesn’t see the rest, just steadfastly stares down into his soda, watches the bubbles rise in their slow, rhythmic patterns.

Eventually, the bartender gets suspicious after Warren’s waxing poetic about his fake ID or some shit, and shoos them out with a halfhearted threat to call the cops and a withering glare.

If Spencer can be honest, the rest of that evening is a bit of a blur. It’s a series of snapshots and short moments in a whirlwind, like his dreams where he’s trying to catch the Audubons fluttering in the air, knowing he can reach them if he tries, able to see the ones before him so clearly while the others fade in the distance.

From the bar, they end up hopping around, stopping in everywhere and anywhere they can to see who’ll take Warren’s fake without any questions. Their luck is spotty at best, pathetic at worst, but Spencer eventually finds himself in a club with the lights low and the music loud, strobes flashing with the beat. Warren’d caught the bouncer in small talk, flashing his ID and playing the quintessential tourist while Spencer strolled in, pretending like he belonged and his driver's license didn’t place him at a smooth two years under the drinking age.

While he’s waiting for Warren to catch up to him, he has a long moment to take in everything, the pulsing deep motion that’s running through the entire place, the tide that’s pulling at the crowd with rippling waves while the music rumbles through every atom of his skin. The sound’s a room all it’s own with how it crushes and presses, holds itself over him like a ceiling. Everything’s so big and overwhelming and he can’t make out any faces in the swarm of people, just a constant repetition of the same forms that he feels so small against.

Maybe he’s anxious or maybe he’s overtired, but when Warren finally appears at his side, holding something that’s glinting in the flashes of light that move over them, Spencer feels a kind of relief that stills everything around him. Warren’s leaning in close, hovering half a step away, holding what he can now see is two glasses, carrying them by the rims in a valiant effort to keep them from spilling.

“You need this more than I do,” Warren yells over the music, though it’s barely a whisper when Spencer hears it.

Spencer, for all his insisting he wouldn’t drink, caves the second Warren presses a glass into his hand, already pretty far gone himself. There’s something about how the speakers are hammering every last note into his brain and the air is closing in on him that makes him want to reach for it. He wants to try and say no, shake his head, anything, but Warren’s pouting at him and he doesn’t know how to say no to those eyes, never has been. He guesses that’s why they’re in this mess at all.

He wonders if the girl from the bar could say no to those eyes, either.

He takes the glass, tries to focus on the cool condensation along the sides, the ice barely visible in the strange, dim lighting, and drinks.

And drinks.

And drinks.

He recognizes it as whiskey and tries not to let out a bitter laugh. _Taste it from the front of the mouth to the back_ he thinks to himself, wonders if Warren knows what he’s done or if he’s still flying on blind luck and lack of tact. Probably both.

He remembers dancing a bit, because the edges of the crowd seemed just a bit softer, less harsh and unforgiving than they were before while Warren was pulling him in toward the crush. Spencer thinks he hears him yell something about the song that’s playing, but he’s already disappeared into the movement. He remembers having conversations, nonsense small talk while someone buys another round. Out of the corner of his eye, he swears he catches glimpses of Warren, lit up in red and blue between the beats, eyes closed against the world and leaning into every motion like it’s his last. There’s a freeness, a loose comfort in the spontaneity that Spencer’s barely seen with Warren before. It’s a good look on him.

If anyone asks Spencer, the night ends just like that. He’ll say that it was fun, sure, but he kept his head on his shoulders, focused on what they had to do the next day. If he was really pressed, he’d mention that he and Warren eventually talked, worked out some miscommunications and patched up their friendship the best that they could after a dumb disagreement that he’d keep purposefully vague.

 

* * *

 

That...That’s not the truth.

But you know that, already.

 

* * *

 

They’re on the way back to their shitty hotel, well past last call while they bob between the streetlights. Warren’s on his theatrics, crooning some song under his breath while he’s got one arm around Spencer’s shoulders. The air’s frigid, but Warren’s a human space heater, radiating warmth at every point of contact between them. Spencer doesn’t want to admit it, but it’s feels good to be pretending everything is okay. He could almost pretend that he’s imagining the tension running through Warren’s shoulders like a live wire, but its distant enough that it doesn’t matter.

They’re able to keep the path relatively straight thank you very much, with the exceptions of Warren’s excited gestures at anything that catches his attention. They’re full body motions that lurch him toward whatever he’s pointing to, taking Spencer along for the ride. All he can do is focus on the way his breath is visible in the streetlights, curling up and away in wisps.

“I fucking love this city,” Warren says contentedly, while his chin is resting on top of Spencer’s hair. The wind is kicking up again, and Spencer’s watching a discarded newspaper tumble across the empty street. He’s absentmindedly curling back into the warmth of Warren’s side, safe against the chill and everything that came along with it. He swears he can feel his heartbeat through both their coats with its steadying, cyclical pattern against his shoulder blade.

He has a sudden, sharp memory of when they were ten, making snow angels on one of their rare and in-between snow days. He had lept out of bed at the first crack of dawn, walked to Warren’s house in the early morning light just because he could. He remembers the cold seeping into his bones, making his fingers stiff through his gloves as he pressed his hands into the snow. They’d pelted each other with snowballs, chased each other around the subdivision with handfuls of ice that they threatened to drop down the collar of the other’s shirt. There was a kind of crisp, glowing purity, a freeness of it all, of Warren’s eyes peeking out between his scarf and hood, the silence of freshly-fallen snow and the absence of any bird call in the stillness.

It’s such an incongruous thing, this random memory that bubbled up unwarranted, but suddenly the ache in his chest is back in full force. He misses it. All of it. He’s sick of imperceptible changes, of growing older and the hollows of complicated doubt that crept in.

“I’m sorry,” he says, all suddenly and rushed. He hears his own voice crack, and he feels his face heating up. Warren makes a confused noise, a rumble in his throat that Spencer feels more than hears, and he has to take a moment to choke back tears at it, at how much he misses all of this.

“I dunno what you’re talking about, man,” Warren murmurs. His voice is softer than Spencer would have expected, gentle where there’d been steel, hesitant where there should be confidence.

“Bullshit.” Spencer risks wiping at his eyes with the heel of his hand, and he focuses on the hot tears that turn cold too quickly. “You know what I did. I fucked up and I don’t know how to take it back.” Through his heavy breathing and a heartbeat thudding against his side, he barely realizes they’ve slowed to a stop.

“Tell me what you did.” Warren’s a strange kind of insistent, trying his damndest to be comforting in his gesture and tone but Spencer can feel something’s off. Somehow that hurts more than anything.

“You fucking know, man.” He’s crying in earnest now, twin tracks of tears running down his cheeks, but he feels like he can’t move from the spot he’s standing in.

“I need to hear you say it. Please, Spence.”

“I kissed you. I fucking kissed you, okay? I kissed you and you freaked out and I ruined everything. I didn’t mean to, you just looked like the fucking sun, sitting there and then something clicked and I realized—” His voice cracks, and he holds back a sob. He knows he’s probably babbling, looking pathetic as all hell. “It—it doesn’t matter. I didn’t mean to.”

There’s a long, long pause. Spencer swears he doesn’t hear either of them breathe.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Warren finally says with a breathless laugh and Spencer feels his heart sink for a long, drawn out second but Warren’s leaning in, lips right next to his ear, his breath a stark contrast from the chill in the air. He’s hyper-aware of where Warren’s pressed against him, from shoulder to knee, practically vibrating with energy.

“I would like it very much if you’d kiss me again,” he says, voice slow and measured, soft with a smile that Spencer doesn’t have to see to know is vibrant like daylight. “And mean it this time.”

Spencer turns and breaks the the circle of Warren’s arms, already planning out what he’s going to yell at him for joking like that, for making him say it out loud and then throw it back in his face. But when Spencer’s facing him, he’s not looking at a joking smirk, no half-laughing crinkle at the corner of his eyes.

No, when he looks at Warren, Warren’s watching him with wide eyes, lips half parted, some kind of wonder behind how he’s holding his breath, lightly pressing his fingertips into Spencer’s side like he can’t believe he’s real.

He knows he could wax poetic for ages about that one moment, the moment the entire city seemed to stand still. The wind seemed to freeze in the air and the sound of distant traffic faded away into nothing. The world is narrowed down to the two of them, the space under a single streetlight and nothing else, the air electric as they hovered inches from each other.

Well, Warren said to kiss him.

So he does.

It so strangely familiar that, for a split second, he feels like they’re back in his dorm room with the heater blaring behind them rather than the cold streets of New York. He’s closing his eyes against it all, caught up in how fast his heart is beating in his chest. This time though, Warren’s only frozen for a fraction of a second, not shaking with any kind of anxiety but thrumming with excitement. He’s over-enthusiastic, leaning down and cupping Spencer’s jaw in both his hands like he’s been waiting for this for months, years. Warren’s mouth is on his, his tongue in his mouth, his teeth grazing his bottom lip, it’s all a catharsis, a fullness, a break in the dam that’s been on the verge of cracking for years.

It’s messy, it’s erratic, like sensory overload, like the moment you’re waking up from a dream: the manic energy on the edge of reality. Warren’s all-encompassing, and Spencer’s got a hand in his hair and another on the hood of his jacket to anchor himself while Warren’s walking them backward, pressing him against the light pole, letting his lips drift to Spencer’s neck, sucking fireworks into his skin.

“Warren,” he says, insistently if breathlessly. It barely breaks the silence, doesn’t even break up the fucked up tableau they’ve got going on. He doesn’t know if he even heard him, with how he’s thumbing at the collar of Spencer’s shirt and kissing along the underside of his jaw.

“Warren, c’mon,” he says again, louder and a little more intensely, and to his credit, Warren freezes immediately, leans back an inch, pretending for all the world that he isn’t waiting for the words that’ll shatter it all and call this all off. Seeing that, Spencer feels weirdly protective, hating every moment that they’d been in the lurch between their first kiss and this very moment. “We should get back to the hotel.” A breath, like he can’t find the words between it. “Pretty sure if we keep it up out here, it’ll be public indecency.”

The moment’s long and drawn out again, but this time Warren’s smirking. It’s a proud, reverent look with heat behind it, and it makes every inch of Spencer’s skin burn to know that he’s the cause of it.

Warren pulls him into a kiss, a deep, sudden thing that catches him by surprise with words in his mouth and leaves him breathless when Warren pulls back, lips red and face flushed. “I’ll race you,” he says, and Spencer’s still trying to process it while he takes off in the direction of where they’re staying, whoops loud into the night.

“That’s cheating, you fucker!” Spencer shouts out into the night, out into the silence, out into the world that feels so, so small but still so cavernous around him. 

***

They run through New York, chasing each other between the flicker of streetlights, through parks, past unlit windows staring out like eyes. They catch each other, pressing the other against brownstone apartments and darkened storefronts, dragging the other by the hand into a space between two buildings or behind a tree before he slips away, starts running again, giggling all the while like they’re free from everything.

Eventually, they slow when they get to the hotel, out of breath with their arms slung over each other. Spencer’s face is buried in Warren’s hood; Warren’s fingers tucked into Spencer’s back pocket. They try to keep it subtle as they pass the woman at the front desk, but Spencer feels her eyes on them, with their chest heaving and red cheeks, laughing in the sparse space between them.

He thinks they keep it together well enough, passing off as just a pair of drunks out past their curfew, having a few too many to drink before stumbling back.

Or at least, he thinks they do, until they’re standing in the elevator, waiting for the door to close and Warren leans in like he’s gonna whisper something in his ear before pressing his lips firmly to the corner of his jaw, a hand on his chin to steady him.

It’s a blur, getting up to the room. Spencer can’t remember what floor they’re on and Warren’s struggling to find the key without taking his hands off Spencer. They’re a mess, a whirlwind of wasted time that they’re trying to make up for, a decade in some cases, a lost second in others.

Still, they eventually get in the room, throwing the latch behind them, letting the cheap wood rattle in its frame while Spencer pushes Warren against it, returning the favor for the bruises he feels blooming along his collarbone. He lets his jacket slide off his shoulders, quietly pool at his feet. Distantly, a car passes in the night, throws light over the scene for half a second before the room grows dim.

Spencer feels himself being walked back, over his discarded coat, into the room, but barely registers it, just feels the carpet move under his feet while he’s preoccupied with the way Warren’s jacket is caught on his arms, refusing to budge. It isn’t until his knees hit the bed and he’s pressed back onto the sheets that he snaps back to it, looks up and sees Warren standing over him, his hair hanging in his face, just barely masking his soft expression. He steps out of vision for a second, but then he’s back. He’s shirtless and Spencer can’t stop staring at his tattoos, the blown out lines like shadows in the dark room.

He’s leaning up, catching Warren in a kiss, slow like they have all the time in the world. He feels hands at the hem of his shirt and then cold palms pressed against his stomach. He lets out an involuntary gasp, feels his breath catch in his throat.

“C’mon,” Warren murmurs against his lips, lying Spencer back down, peeling off his shirt the rest of the way, tugging off his jeans and boxers in a few motions. He tries to be of help, but he feels like he can’t do much more than lift his hips and try not to fall apart at the smallest things, like Warren’s focused expression, the way his fingers brush over his hips, his aching cock, all of it.

Too quickly, he’s lying back, focusing on the way the thin sheets feel on his bare skin while Warren’s pressed against him in earnest, his jeans rubbing against him in a way that makes him gasp, reach out blindly, wrap an hand around the back of his neck.

He feels Warren’s hands hands all over him, hovering over the surface of his skin he’s looking at one of his drawings. Every point of contact is reverent, graphite-quick and light. There’s no plan, everything’s sketched out in rough outlines around them. He’s dizzy with it, high on the idea that this can exist, that _they_ can exist and he can unravel out on these sheets and still wake up to this reality tomorrow.

The flat of Warren’s tongue is against his throat, pressed against his pulse point, against his collar. He bites just over Spencer’s heartbeat like he can taste the jackhammering rhythm, again at the sharp of his hip, the muscle of his thigh.

Suddenly, he feels nothing but the air of the room against his skin. He sits up, props himself on an elbow, sees Warren kneeling on the floor in front of him, eyes half-hazy, staring up at Spencer like he’s everything, fumbling at the zipper of his jeans, rocking against his own palm. It’s a sight to behold, a memory he won’t ever forget because it’s already imprinted on the inside of his eyelids for the rest of his fucking life.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” he says before he can think it. He wants to feel embarrassed at it, but Warren’s frozen in place, eyes half-lidded, lips parted, looking for all the world like he just short-circuited before he lets a low keening sound slip, resonating in the still air. This, _this_ , he’ll remember for all of eternity.

It’s a long moment before Warren seems to come to, blinking out of the haze, shucking off his jeans, and crawling up onto the bed over Spencer. He nudges him back wordlessly, and Spencer pulls himself back toward the headboard to comply, half propped up on the thin pillows.

It’s Spencer’s turn to forget to breathe as Warren settles himself in the V of Spencer’s legs. For all his confidence and grandeur, he seems the slightest bit hesitant as he places his hands on Spencer’s thighs, leans in until they’re nose to nose.

“I hope you’re as nervous as I am.”

Spencer tries to say something, anything, but he’s lost in watching expressions flit across Warren’s face, the slow rise and fall of his shoulders, the gentle look that never leaves his eyes, the sharp undercurrent that it masks. He thinks of the Audubons, of the warblers, of the eyes that seem too knowing as he stares into them.

“You know it,” he finally responds, breathless, thoughtless, hyperfocused on pressing his lips to Warren’s and getting a soft, affirmative sound from the back of his throat.

He hears his own breath, light and fluttering like birds’ wings inside his chest, and tangles his fingers in Warren’s hair.

 

* * *

 

Remember all that shit about In Media Res? This, this is the crescendo.

This is the moment that defined it all, solidified a chapter in his life that he keeps in a glass case, protected from other people’s truths. Spencer’s brightest memories of the whole thing aren’t of getting his hands on the books, of stepping foot in the room where it happened, going to the appraiser, none of it. He remembers Warren’s touch, his lips against his, the taste of whiskey and whispered words.

It doesn't matter how the full story ends, how they drop the books, how they get caught, how they lose the court case, how they both end up in solitary. He has this. They had this.

Sometimes, he’ll tell himself whatever half truths he needs to to get through the day, through the narrative, anything.

But he knows.

And Warren does too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'd appreciate any feedback you have on this work--especially since I've been thinking about writing another fic in this fandom!


End file.
